The business and culture of our digital lives, from the L.A. Times

Suicide girls get sizzling bacon 'bro' tattoos at SXSW

March 15, 2009 | 10:00
am

Talk about bringing home the bacon. At Saturday night's Bigg Digg party at Stubb's BBQ in Austin, Texas, I ran across two young ladies from the tech world who were sporting brand-new, hot-off-the-grill bacon tattoos.

Lynn LaVallee, a.k.a. @poshy, and her friend Jessica Zollman, a.k.a. @jayzombie, in town for the South by Southwest music and media conference, consummated their roommate-ship early. The two San Francisco-based women, both Suicide Girls (that's the Web's "enlightened" erotic-photo site), are moving in together next month, and they both love bacon. Hence the decision to get their "bro tatts." Bacon is, of course, one of the Web's silliest memes (see this short explainer video).

LaVallee, 28 and a Web engineer at Outspark, got a piece of cooked, greasy bacon on her bicep (above), whereas Zollman, an intern at Spin Magazine, went more raw with a piece of uncooked bacon on her upper rib area (below).

"We found out we both loved bacon the first time we ever met," said Zollman. The tattoos, which they got together on Friday, are "kind of like a roommate bonding thing."

"It's kind of like I didn’t want cooked, crispy bacon," Zollman, 23, explained. "I wanted delicious, marble, meaty
richness." This was her "ninth or 10th" tattoo, she said. I wondered why she chose such a sensitive area for this bit of
meat art?

"I've always wanted to do my rib to see how it feels," she said. "And to know whether or not I could handle it, because ribs in the tattoo world is supposed to be the most painful area. It was really rough, but I'm really glad that I did it."

Besides, she said: "Raw meat, sexuality, food -- I think they all go hand in hand."

As a bonus, LaVallee showed me another techtoo she got two weeks ago.

"I'm a Web engineer," she explained, "so the tattoo represents the proper separation layers of a Web document. The first file is the structural layer -- which is the house. The second is the presentational layer -- CSS -- and the third is the behavioral layer, which is JavaScript."